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How the Ancient Past Can Enlighten Us About Climate Change

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Andrew Moore. (contributed photo)
Andrew Moore. (contributed photo)

By Anne W. Semmes
Sentinel Columnist

Climate change is complicated.

But on Saturday Andrew Moore, an Oxford-educated Brit, now American, came to the Bruce Museum as guest speaker for the Archeological Associates of Greenwich (for the seventh time) and showed us how study of the past helps us to understand climate change. His science of archaeology covers the last three million years of human cultural development, with its “constant climatic change,” including 20 ice ages and various global warmings.

Take for instance what has happened in Syria climate-wise starting back when the last ice age was warming up, some 20,000 to 13,000 years ago. Moore, who heads up the illustrious Archaeological Institute of America, told of his historic dig in 1972-73 in a Syrian village called Abu Hureyra that showed the inception of farming.

“People had first arrived there 13,500 years ago, living as hunters and gatherers,” Moore said, “but things changed with the arrival of an asteroid or comet 12,900 years before the present.

“The asteroid/comet melted a chunk of the North American ice sheet, shutting down the circulation of the Atlantic Ocean. The climate then went cold and dry for 1,400 years.” Not good for hunters-gatherers, whose plants were disappearing, and some of their animals. “That’s why people had to start farming, to replace the plant foods that had gone missing,” he said. “They later adopted domestic animals to complete the farming economy.”

That 2007 asteroid/comet discovery finally explained for Moore his finding visible remains of incineration at the bottom of the pits he was digging in Abu Hureyra: “It gives the excavation we conducted new relevance for issues in the present day.”

Moore then fast-forwarded us to present-day Syria. “Their seven-year drought has undermined their economy and sent the rural population to the city, causing civil conflict, and the mass migration of Syrian refugees in the summer of 2015, where one million or more walked from Syria to Turkey.” An evocative slide showing the mass migration ended Moore’s lecture.

Moore’s talk was inspirational to two Greenwich High School juniors, Sophie Lindh and Rosanna Neri. They approached Moore wanting to dig deeper into the profession of archaeology and were directed to possible digs. But it was climate change that was driving their interest, and Moore had confirmed what they were learning in school.

“We’re learning how Syria has been impacted by drought in my AP Environmental Science class,” said Lindh, “There’s limited access to water that has caused a conflict in the government—with so many refugees. It’s more than just politics. It’s the environment itself.”

“We’re both members of a younger generation aware of the massive impact of what’s happening with climate change and how it needs to be understood,” said Neri. “People need to know it’s real.”

The two are impassioned enough to want to create a nonprofit “to educate people about the main issues at hand,” said Neri. “We want real change in this country.”

Professor Andrew M.T. Moore will lead a session on “The Technological Revolution and Archaeology: New Ways of Understanding the Past” on Jan. 6 during the 118th Joint Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the Society of Classical Studies in Toronto, Canada, Jan. 5 to 7. For more, visit www.archaeological.org/annualmeeting.

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